1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to apparatus and methods for recording, computing and billing the long-distance or toll calls made by various persons (guests or patients and staff) in an institution having a transient population, such as a hospital, hotel, motel, or company corporate headquarters.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Forty or fifty years ago, what is accomplished with the present invention was done, if at all, by the personal attention of one of the institution's switchboard operators and the bookkeeping personnel of the institution. Initially, we had neither telephone equipment that would produce the sort of signals required for this sort of system, nor the electronic computers to receive, store, and manipulate (calculate) the signals, nor the output or display systems (printers, CRT screens) that make such a system practical. When computers were first invented, they were for many years too large, cumbersome, expensive, difficult to program and/or unreliable for any system such as that herein disclosed to be practical.
The basic problem of recording data concerning toll calls made from different identifiable stations of a telephone system, and computing bills for each station, is one that is faced not only by a hospital or hotel but also by the telephone company itself, and it is not surprising that, because of the greater volume of calls to be handled and bills to be calculated and prepared, the principal early advances towards solving the problem of generating proper statements were made by the telephone company. As any telephone customer knows, there are now prepared monthly statements of long-distance calls which are to a great extent, if not always entirely, generated by automatic computer equipment. This implies that the telephone company has, some time ago, solved the problem of connecting individual stations to a call-pricing computer and a backup memory, and connecting the computer to appropriate printer means.
This all does not solve the problems which confront the administrator of a hospital or hotel with respect to providing individual statements for patients or guests. It does not provide any sort of record independent of that made by the telephone company, so that any telephone-company errors in billing could be detected. It also does not give the administrator what he needs in terms of prompt statements and useful reports, because he has patients or guests leaving the premises who should be required to pay before they depart, and he also wishes to be alerted promptly if there is any instance of heavy use or of the making of unauthorized calls. Moreover, especially in hospitals, a given patient is not infrequently moved from one room to another during his stay, so that what the telephone company wants to produce (a month-end statement of all calls from a given extension) is not useful to the administrator, because it comes too late and does not break down the charges into the ones attributable to the individuals who have used that extension during that month, and it also does not assemble into one statement the calls made by a patient from the various rooms that he occupied during his stay. The alternative of having all long-distance calls routed to a telephone-company human operator who makes the necessary records is available, but it is more costly for the patient or guest, depriving him of any chance to take advantage of the lowest rates for direct-dial, non-operator-assisted calls.
It needs to be admitted that at least some of the individual components which are required for the functioning of a system according to the present invention have, per se, been known before now.
For example, there are about fifty known, commercially available systems known as "Call Detail Recording" or "Station Message Detail Reporting," and any of these may be added as a feature to an existing institution PBX.
Another component of this apparatus of the present invention which may be taken as already known per se is a suitable call-record storing system, such as the known COM DEV Model STU-4 pollable call-record storage device. It is known in the art to use such a device in store-and-forward applications which enable remote batch processing of stored call-detail-recording (CDR) records; it is believed to be novel to use such a device as a back-up memory system which is activated if a call-pricing computer is not operating.
It can also be taken as known that there is existing computer equipment which is suitable for use as a call-pricing computer in a system such that proposed in accordance with the present invention. For example, there exists a computer known as a Zilog Series 8000 Model 11 mini-computer, which features a Z 8000 CPU, a random-access memory of 512,000 bytes, a 19 MB hard disc, a 17 MB streaming tape cartridge, and 8 input-output terminal ports. This or any other computer of substantially equivalent or greater capabilities of speed, storage, and input-output could be used. The existence of such commercially available hardware does not, it must be understood, imply that it would be obvious to surround it with the other means taught and disclosed herein to arrive at an apparatus which serves the purposes of the present invention.
The prior art has been such that
(1) there are no interim reports about heavy or expensive usage of long-distance facilities unless a human operator is used,
(2) there are no immediate reports about placing of unauthorized calls, and
(3) previous systems have not provided for the possibility of having the equipment locally present at a hospital or hotel connected telephonically to a remote location which has "Reset After Malfunction" capabilities, i.e., the existing equipment utilized at hotels and hospitals does not provide for a telephone link which will make it possible to perform remotely the diagnosis and the correction, by reprogramming or otherwise, of existing problems. It is believed that in the hospital industry, a two-way link between the institution's computer for generating patient bills and a telephone-call-pricing computer also is novel and unique.